We've assembled a panel to examine service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing -- the relationships, the inter-reliance and the realities. Three years ago, the IT transformation poster child was SOA, and now we're well into the hype curve around cloud computing, but has one actually given way to the other? Are they linear in their relationship, or perhaps mutually dependent in some ways, and to what degree?

We’ll explore today whether SOA has found new value and relevance as a foundation and perhaps catalyst for cloud computing, especially for so-called private clouds. And, we'll see how the emergence of SOA and cloud may be happening in different places inside of enterprises. Shouldn’t one hand get to quickly know what the other is up to and perhaps even work together?

Here with us now, however, to plumb the depths of how SOA and cloud computing do or don’t come together, are a SOA expert from the Open Group, as well as an Oracle expert on architecture, and a Salesforce.com executive on cloud computing.

We're here with Dr. Chris Harding, director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Gardner: Let me take our first question to you, Chris. You’ve been working with SOA for some time with a work group at The Open Group. Has the SOA conversation changed in the last several years due to the interest in cloud computing?

Harding: Well, Dana, the conversation has changed in that, five years ago, when we started getting into SOA, there was a huge amount of excitement and a great deal of buzz about it. Now, we can see that the hype cycle has run its course, but we're still seeing a great deal of technical interest in SOA and we're also seeing that companies are using it and are increasing their use of it. So, there is a steady uptake in the use of SOA, although the excitement about it has died down.

Gardner: That’s an interesting effect, where the interest seems to be less, but the actual implementation is more. Peter Coffee, do you have any sense of how SOA is working or not working in your efforts around cloud computing?

Considerable upside

Coffee: I've been covering SOA for a long time. Before I was at salesforce.com, I was with the industry journal eWEEK, so I had a lot of opportunity to talk with people who were in the evaluation and adoption phase. I'd say the people who adopted SOA in the previous decade got considerable upside, but those who did not didn’t really suffer any penalty for not doing so.

In the situation we're in now, where the economics of cloud computing are becoming quite compelling, the downside of not having a SOA is becoming quite apparent. If you don’t have a service environment, then your ability to extend your current assets and integrate them with cloud services is going to be somewhat hampered.

So, people are realizing now that the wait-and-see option is more perilous than it used to be. This is accelerating the actual adoption of what we would call SOA, except that’s no longer the label du jour.

Gardner: Stephen Bennett, from an architecture perspective, do you also see that the SOA activities are no longer a nice-to-have, particularly if you're interested in working towards grid, cloud, utility types of computing models?

Bennett: It's definitely a necessity, and the majority of large enterprises today are doing SOA in one fashion or another at different levels of maturity, whether that’s from the quite immature approach of seeing it as a pure integration play all the way up to seeing it more as a business agility kind of play.

So, it's becoming a norm and, therefore, we don’t need to keep hyping it or pushing it. We need to use the characteristics it offers with other supporting technology strategies such as cloud.

Gardner: Back to you, Chris Harding. When we think about how to approach SOA and about some of the business models that seem to be attractive around cloud computing, do you think that they're happening in different places. Is there a dissonance of some sort in some of the enterprises? That's to say is one hand doing SOA, the other doing cloud, and they're not necessarily coming together very much.

Harding: Enterprises are complex organisms, and often different parts of them aren't completely in sync. It’s very interesting that service orientation is very much a business concept, and SOA has been about the application of that business concept to the technology. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is very much a technical concept. It’s about what you can do with technology over the Internet.

It is a technical concept, but it has had really a big impact on the business structure. So you can see them as complementary. SOA has been the application of business principles into the technology. Cloud is a technical concept, which has had a huge impact on the business. So, yes, there probably are different parts of the organizations looking at cloud and looking at SOA, but there is a big dynamic that says they should be working together on both of them.

Gardner: How about from your perspective, Peter Coffee? Do you see different cultures, priorities, or efforts at work that haven’t quite matched up or connected yet?

Two perspectives

Coffee: I certainly do, and I’d like to look at that from two perspectives. First, without actually disagreeing with Chris, I see things slightly differently. It seems to me that SOA very quickly became a label of products that vendors wanted to sell. So, you saw a lot of things like enterprise service bus (ESB) products and so on.

It became dangerously easy to think that you were doing SOA, if you were buying the tools and failing to appreciate how much of a cultural and management achievement it was to get people to think of themselves not as owners of and the gatekeepers to an IT asset, but instead being publishers of and supporters of a service to other parts of the business.

The second point goes back to what was said just a moment ago by Steven. It’s absolutely critical to understand that you can view SOA as simply a way of integrating the stuff you have, or you can move to the next level and start to think of it as the way you do your business. The way your business units interact with and support each other with the technology is just the enabler for that.

The same is true of the cloud. It's possible to take the existing IT model of isolated applications, each with their own data stores, and replicate that model in the cloud with elastic scalability of capacity. That would be the level of the cloud industry that’s typically called infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Or, it's possible to use the cloud as a much more interesting and fluid medium for interaction among much more granular and business-oriented services at the level that’s traditionally been called in the industry either platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). It depends on the level at which you choose to consume other people’s application work, instead of doing new application development yourself.

So, it’s really important to realize the orthogonality between the technology you're adopting and the manner in which you are using it. It’s possible to do SOA without the cloud. It’s possible to do better SOA with it. It is also possible to do an isolated silo-oriented architecture locally and also to do that in a cloud environment. Neither one necessarily implies or impels the other.

Gardner: But, they certainly seem to have a mutual reinforcing benefit for one another.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well.

Coffee: Exactly. As I said earlier, the economics of being able to have elastically scalable capacity to be able to handle peak loads without needing to own the peak capacity and wind up with very low utilization rates on your capacity are becoming so compelling that people are asking how they're going to take advantage of this opportunity of this cloud environment.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well -- providers of services and providers of expert assistance in using those services.

That’s a very important enabling ware, when your major system integration firms begin fully to understand how they can incorporate cloud services into the portfolio of technologies that they make available to their customers. When you put that all together, the downside of not moving to an SOA becomes an embarrassing lack of ability to take advantages of these incredible economies.

Gardner: Stephen Bennett, we've been working through maturity models and technology and adoption patterns, but we also had a major recession globally, perhaps the worst in 75 years. One of the things that many people thought derailed the adoption of SOA was the lack of funding for added-on expense or discretionary IT spending.

At the same time, we had cloud come in and say, "We can do more for less, increase your productivity, and perhaps add more capacity into your data centers, preventing you from having to invest in additional ones." It seems that cloud has given SOA an economic boost in terms of the rationale for investing in SOA. Does that make sense to you?

Pragmatic and realistic

Bennett: It definitely makes sense, but we also have to be pragmatic and realistic here. Any disruptive approach or technology such as cloud and SOA -- backing up what Peter said -- is not a pure product or technology play. There are other considerations. You have to take the people and process into account. That will require investment and time, investing in your people to acquire the new skills, to address the change management, and to invest in and review your existing IT processes.

Unfortunately, while from the marketing perspective it sounds great, investment and time need to be put into place to support this trend and roll it out.

Gardner: Let me address for just a second. If we're in a recession and if you're no longer fighting the fires at the gross edge of the curve, which is to say, you are just trying to keep up with demand in your IT adoption patterns, but you've had a little bit of a lull in how much demand there is for products and services in your organization, wouldn't that be the perfect time to invest in your people and processes to elevate them to service orientation?

Bennett: Definitely. I actually see recession as an opportunity within IT, because it gives you opportunity to reset thinking and reset IT's approach to actually delivering IT to the business.

I completely agree that the availability of the cloud is a platform for doing this kind of thing. It's a very fortuitous coincidence with the business needs of enterprises that are short on capital.

Coffee: That's particularly true for the cloud, because you can do development without major capital investments. You can build systems, conduct pilot projects, and have solutions that are ready to go. They've been tested with the appropriate stakeholders, and when business conditions improve and create the opportunity to use those at larger scale, you can scale very rapidly to larger capacity, without needing to go through another round of capital budgeting.

So, yes, I completely agree that the availability of the cloud is a platform for doing this kind of thing. It's a very fortuitous coincidence with the business needs of enterprises that are short on capital.

Gardner: So, not only do you fix your roof when the sun is shining, but you can re-factor or modernize your roof while the sun is shining as well.

Coffee: Very much so.

Gardner: Chris Harding, what's going on in The Open Group's work group, when it comes to this skills and process level? Do you see that the recession and/or interest in cloud has increased the demand for people with architectural skills and perhaps certification that is a part and parcel with SOA?

Harding: It's difficult to measure the effect of the recession on education. You could say that if people aren't being required to do productive work 110 percent of the time, then they will give more thought on training and education.

But, also as far as SOA goes, we’ve gotten past the hype. We're into the steady take up deployment of SOA, and that's precisely the time when companies will be looking for people who can demonstrate their ability, professionalism, and qualification with this particular way of doing things.

Allocation of time

And, it's within the SOA Work Group. You can see that at our conferences. We spend a lot less time on presentations on how SOA is evolving and what the new things are, because really there isn't a lot that’s new coming up. We spend a lot more time putting together assessing tutorials on SOA practice and on the how the standards that the SOA Work Group is producing should be interpreted and used.

So, yes, we're moving very definitely into the period with SOA where establishing skills and certifying skills is going to be more important than developing new ways of doing things. We have those ways and we need to consolidate them and ensure that people can use those skills in their work and do so in a beneficial way.

With cloud, it's too early to do that yet, because we're still looking at the new developments when it comes to cloud.

Coffee: Dana, I’d agree with everything that Chris just said, except the statement about it being too early. When I talk with systems integration firms in India, like Tata and Infosys and Wipro, in Hong Kong with people like IBM, and in Europe with people like Accenture, all of them tell me that they are now actively engaging with customers on cloud-based options, as well as either on-premise based options or combinations of the two. So, I would say that we're well into the practitioner phase and not merely the conceptual phase.

It's very dangerous to oversell any of this as a proposition of cost reduction, when really it's an opportunity to reallocate resources from relatively low-value tasks, like administering a software stack, to higher-value tasks like reengineering a business process.

But, in every other respect, I completely agree with Chris. Chris and Steve have both talked about investments we'll be making in training and the development of new skills. This might make some people say, "Wait a minute, I thought this was about reducing my costs."

It's very dangerous to oversell any of this as a proposition of cost reduction, when really it's an opportunity to reallocate resources from relatively low-value tasks, like administering a software stack, to higher-value tasks like reengineering a business process.

If you want to have cheaper IT, you can have cheaper IT, but your company won’t be competitive with all of the performance and service that the industry has come to expect. Over time, IT budgets rise because the return on investment (ROI) is so compelling.

The combination of SOA, which makes your various business units able to cooperate more effectively, with cloud environments which allow you to handle very bursty workloads and conduct very cost-effective pilot projects and scale the ones that work very rapidly, increase the ROI of IT spending. Therefore, over time, IT budgets are going to continue to rise.

Bennett: From what I see, I agree with both of you. I see that there are a number of crossover skills, especially the non-technical skills. Both SOA and cloud heighten the need and importance of existing skills, such as governance, good design, portfolio management, and, more importantly, business architecture.

What people are talking about is the opportunity to redirect costs to area such as business architecture, and business architecture is part of enterprise architecture (EA). That's not purely IT focused, but the wider concern -- investing stuff like business capability maps to understand exactly where I should utilize SOA and cloud with my organization -- is going to be key.

Gardner: Now, on this economic issue, many of the executives I see aren't necessarily interested in reducing the IT budget dollar for dollar, but they are interested in reducing the percentage that IT consumes as a function of overall revenues and perhaps also profit. So if we are going to make things more productive, more efficient, even as we grow IT, what is it about SOA combined with cloud computing that could help do that?

DecentralizationCoffee: The sell with SOA very early on was that by making the IT environment more modular, it became more reasonable to have a business process owner be more intimately involved in the implementation of the technology that would execute that process.

You saw a decentralization, to some degree, of functions that had previously been monolithic development of massive applications, which was clearly the IT department’s charter, to more of a decentralized business-process construction task, which also included some development but now that became more exfiltrated out into the business units themselves.

So, the IT budget, as a line item, is not conspicuously bigger. In fact, it may actually shrink, because the IT department now is a composer and integrator of stuff that may now be getting done with the operating budget by personnel, who are on the payroll as members of a business unit, instead of members of an IT organization.

Gardner: As we also move culturally and organizationally, we'll probably see more adoption of shared services and management around the different economic models of how consumption is charged back. Therefore, with market forces as they tend to go, we’ll see higher efficiency. That is, you only pay for what you consume and you only consume that which you’re interested in paying for. If cloud computing allows for that elasticity, then you’ll only need to provision the resources required for those shared services.

This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

Now, this is a little bit of a vision, of course, but it strikes me that there is an opportunity for higher utilization, higher productivity, and therefore lower total cost. Any reaction?

Harding: That certainly must be one of the factors that will enable cloud computing to make enterprises more efficient -- the elasticity and the take-up effect. It also has a major effect on the risk that an enterprise needs to take on. But, there is a bigger factor, which is meant to drive down cost, and that is competition.

If you take service orientation and cloud in combination, you’re seeing the ability of people to buy services from different suppliers, for those suppliers to compete, and for those suppliers to concentrate on the services that they are particularly good at. This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

So, you don’t need to dissipate your efforts on running an inefficient IT department, which is not your core business. You can outsource that, get a specialist to do it much better, and concentrate on what you're good at. That is the real dynamic that will improve things economically.

Gardner: Do you think that a general adoption of services orientation will allow for those services to be procured based more on the service-level agreements (SLAs) and the requirements, regardless of who is actually sourcing them and building out the data centers? I think this makes a great deal of sense. How does that sit with you?

Harding: I don’t think that people will be switching from supplier to supplier to supplier on a per-transaction basis. They'll be establishing long-term business relationships and partnership with their service suppliers, and it will be in that context that they go out and get more services. But, the fact that they have a choice of suppliers to partner with will mean that those suppliers will be able to provide more efficiently, because they specialize in providing those services.

Now, from an Open Group perspective, there is a danger that you may become locked into a particular supplier. Part of our role in promoting open systems is to push for the standards to be in place so that that doesn’t happen. Provided we can prevent that locking, it’s altogether a very healthy situation.

Gardner: Peter Coffee, I’m sure you have some thoughts on this. It’s sort of the ecosystem question, and the ability to procure based on the differentiation of core and context services.

Granularity is surprising

Coffee: Certainly. The granularity of this marketplace is quite surprising to many people who haven’t looked at it closely. We see already people building applications, in which they have shopped the marketplace and found a cloud storage proposition from one provider, a cloud application development platform from another, social networking algorithms and facilities from yet a third provider and have built some really interesting strategic business solutions.

Starbucks is an example. They built applications that drew information from existing public service directories of community service opportunities, wrapped that in an application shell constructed with our Force.com facilities and packaged that in such a way that it’d be dropped into people’s Facebook pages to create community momentum around projects. They then built a site where, if you did five hours of community service, you could go to your local Starbucks and get a cup of coffee.

This was all implemented in matter of weeks to support President Obama’s call for renewed commitment to public service. It was very strategic from a marketing point of view, lovely from a technology point of view, and dirt-cheap, because there was no capital hardware involved. It was all a composition and integration of existing services from multiple providers. It’s quite startling to many people to realize what a supermarket of services has already come into being.

Gardner: This takes us to another level here, which would be not only thinking about how SOA and cloud come together to do things you had done in the past better, but perhaps be able to do things that you could not have been able to do at all before. We'll have to have this as our closing concept. I’d like to go around the panel. Chris Harding, what is it about SOA and cloud coming together that enables entirely new types of innovation and business benefit?

Harding: I don’t know that there is necessarily anything special, but maybe it’s because when you solve one set of problems you're able to turn your attention to other things and new things that pop up. It’s very difficult to foresee what new developments there will be, but you do get them, and it’s good news.

Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

Gardner: At least we move from "if you build it," the productivity, services, or innovation will come to "let’s just go and do the innovation" and we’ll find a way to do it without having to build very much or anything at all.

Harding: Right.

Gardner: Stephen Bennett, how about you? Do you see an opportunity for SOA and cloud to come together to enable entirely new ways of doing business?

Bennett: I won’t say new ways of doing business, but ways that we were trying to achieve probably over the last 5-10 years. The combination of cloud and SOA obviously brings together kind of speed and modularity. Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

So, in terms of IT being siloed -- "please develop and look after this application" -- it’s going to be more a move towards collaboration of how we can actually deliver business solutions to the ever-changing business dynamics.

Gardner: That really integrates IT more deeply into the business, I suppose, right?

Bennett: Exactly. It's being invited to the table at long last.

Gardner: And, Peter Coffee, the last word to you. What is your perception on being able to do things that hadn’t been done or been able to be done before with this unique combination and interplay between SOA and cloud in its various forms?

Coffee: Steve is exactly right that many of the concepts that are now receiving tremendous attention are not new concepts. I distinctly remember discussions almost 30 years ago about modular applications composed of various components, developed by different parties with different expertise, coming together for the first time in a connected environment. This was going to be one of the things that object-oriented modules of development were going to bring to us.

Very resilient

Finally, we have an environment in which connectivity and real-time linkage and integration of data and function instead of being costly, brittle, and time-consuming are now nearly free, very resilient, and can be done almost more quickly than they can be described.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units instead of having their time consumed by arduous, necessary, but relatively low-value tests of infrastructure maintenance.

So the ROI will rise. The relevance to the business of IT will increase. The sophistication of the skills of the person who does IT for a living will be greater 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago or even today, but we’ll all be pretty happy with the results.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units.

Gardner: It strikes me that perhaps the perception of IT itself might benefit in that IT could be perceived as the enabler of innovation that others will actually do rather than IT being perceived as a bottleneck of innovation that IT needs to have enabled themselves.

Coffee: I've also heard it suggested that we should evolve the title of Chief Information Officer, which refers to a relatively static asset, to the title of Chief Process Officer, which suggests someone who is much closer to the present and future of the business.

Gardner: Or we could go Chief Innovation Officer and we won’t have to change the stationery.

Well, thanks so much. We’ve been listening here to a panel of experts talking about the interplay between SOA and cloud computing. I want to thank our panelists Dr. Chris Harding, Director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group. Thank you, Chris.

Gardner: You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast that’s been done in conjunction with The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference held in Seattle the week of February 1, 2010.

This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect sponsored podcast on the intersection of SOA and cloud computing recorded live at The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle.Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on gaining control over energy use and misuse in enterprise data centers. More often than not, very little energy capacity analysis and planning is being done on data centers that are five years old or older. Even newer data centers don’t always gather and analyze the available energy data being created amid all of the components.

Such data gathering, analysis and planning can break the inefficiency cycle that plagues many data centers where hotspots can mismatch cooling needs, and underused and under-needed servers are burning up energy needlessly. Done well, such solutions as Hewlett Packard's (HP)Smart Grid for Data Center can increase capacity by 30-50 percent just by gaining control over energy use and misuse.

We're here today with two executives from HP to delve more deeply into the notion of Smart Grid for Data Center. Please join me in welcoming Doug Oathout, Vice President of Green IT Energy Servers and Storage at HP. Welcome Doug.

. . . The drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending . . .

Doug Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back to the show, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: John, let me start with you, if you don’t mind. Let’s set up a little bit of the context for this whole energy lifecycle approach. It’s not isolated. It’s part of a larger set of trends that we loosely call data center transformation (DCT). What’s going on with DCT and how important is the role these energy conversation approaches play?

Bennett: DCT, as we’ve discussed before Dana, is focused on three core concepts, and behind it, energy is another key focus for that work. But, the drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending, either flowing it to the bottom-line or, in most cases, trying to shift that spending away from management and maintenance and onto business projects, business priorities, and innovation in support of the business and business growth.

We also see increasing mandates to improve sustainability. It might be expressed as energy efficiency in handling energy costs more effectively or addressing green IT. The issues that customers have in executing on this, of course, is that the facilities, their people, their infrastructure and applications, everything they are spending and doing today -- if they don’t change it -- can get in the way of them realizing these objectives.

Data center strategy

So, DCT is really about helping customers build out a data center strategy and an infrastructure strategy. That is aligned to their business plans and goals and objectives. That infrastructure might be a traditional shared infrastructure model. It might be a fabric infrastructure model of which HP’s converged infrastructure is probably the best and most complete example of that in the marketplace today. And, it may indeed be moving to private cloud or, as I believe, some combination of the above for a lot of customers.

Energy has definitely been a major issue for data-center customers over the past several years. The increased computing capability and demand has increased the power needed in the data center. Many data centers today weren’t designed for modern energy consumption requirements. Even data centers that were designed even five years ago are running out of power, as they move to these dense infrastructures. Of course, older facilities are even further challenged. So, customers can address energy by looking at their facilities.

More recently, we in the industry have been focused on the infrastructure and layout of the data center. Increasingly, we're finding that we need to look at management -- managing the infrastructure and managing the facilities in order to address the energy cost issues and the increasing role of regulation and to manage energy related risk in the data center.

That brings us not only to energy as a key initiative in DCT, but on Smart Grid for Data Center as a key way of managing it effectively and dynamically.

I think the best control of energy is probably better described as built-in and not layered on.

Gardner: You know, John, it’s interesting. When I hear you describe this, it often sounds as if you are describing security. I know that sounds odd, but security has some of the same characteristics. You can’t look at it individually. It needs to be taken in as a comprehensive view that there are risks associated, and that it becomes management-intensive. Maybe we can learn from the way in which people approach security. Perhaps, they should also be thinking along similar lines when they approach energy as a problem?

Bennett: That’s an interesting analogy, and the point I would add to that, Dana, is that the best security is built-in, not layered on. I think the best control of energy is probably better described as built-in and not layered on.

Gardner: Let’s go to Doug. Doug. Tell me what the problem is out there. What are folks facing and how inefficient are their data centers really? What kind of inefficiency is common now?

Oathout: Dana, what we're really talking about is a problem around energy capacity in a data center. Most IT professionals or IT managers never see an energy bill from the utility. It's usually handled by the facility. They never really concentrate on solving the energy consumption problem.

Problem area

Where problems have arisen in the past is when a facility person says that they can’t deploy the next server or storage unit, because they're out of capacity to build that new infrastructure to support a line of business. They have to build a new data center. What we're seeing now is customers starting to peel the onion back a little bit, trying to find out where the energy is going, so they can increase the life of their data center.

To date, very few clients have deployed comprehensive software strategies or facility strategies to corral this energy consumption problem. Customers are turning their focus to how much energy is being absorbed by what and then, how do they get the capacity of the data center increase so they can support the new workloads.

The way to do that is to get the envelope cleared up so we know how much is left. What we're seeing today is that software, hardware, and people need to come together in a process that John described in DCT, an energy audit, or energy management.

All those things need to come together, so that customers can now start taking apart their data center, from an analysis perspective, to find out where they are either over-provisioned or under-provisioned, from a capacity standpoint, so they know where all the energy is going. Then, they can then take some steps to get more capability out of their current solution or get more capability out of their installed equipment by measuring and monitoring the whole environment.

Gardner: John, we’ve already done a podcast on converged infrastructure, and I don’t want to belabor that point too much, but it strikes me that going about this data center energy exercise in alignment with a converged-infrastructure approach would make a lot of sense. We're starting to see commonality in ways we hadn’t seen before.

Bennett: There’s very strong commonality there, and I’ll ask Doug to address that in a minute. When I described the best energy solution as being built-in, that really captured the essence of what we're doing with converged infrastructure. It’s not only integrating the elements of the data center, but better instrumenting them from a management and automation perspective. One of the key drivers for making management and automation decisions about provisioning and workload locations will be energy cost and consumption. Doug?

Oathout: Converged infrastructure is really about deploying IT in the optimal way to support a workload. We talk about energy and energy management. You're talking about doing the same thing. You want to deploy that workload to a server and storage networking environment that will do the amount of work you need with the least amount of energy.

The concept of converged infrastructure applies to data center energy management. You can deploy a particular workload onto an IT infrastructure that is optimally designed to run efficiently and optimally designed to continually run in an efficient way, so that you know you're getting the most productive work from the least energy and the more energy efficient equipment infrastructure sitting underneath it.

An example of this is identifying what type of application you want to run on your infrastructure and then deploying the right amount of resources to run that application. You're not deploying more and not deploying less, but deploying the optimal amount of resources that you know that you are getting the best productivity for the energy budget that you have.

Adding resources

As that workload grows over time, you have the capability built into the software and into the monitoring, so that you can add more resources to that pool to run that application. You're not over-provisioning from the start and you're not under-provisioning, but you're getting the optimal settings over time. That's what's really important for energy, as well as efficiency, as well as operating within a data center environment.

You want to keep it optimal over time. You don’t want to set up silos to start. You don’t want to set up over-provisioning to start. You want to be able to optimally run your infrastructure long-term. Therefore, you must have tools, software, and hardware that is not only efficient, but can be optimized and run in an optimized way over a long period of time.

Gardner: Another trend in the data center nowadays is moving toward shared-services approaches, viewing yourself as a service provider, and billing based on these workloads and on the actual demand. It seems to me that energy needs to fit into that as well. Perhaps, as we think about private cloud, where we’ve got elasticity of resources, energy needs to be elastic, along with the workload allocation. So, quickly, John, what about the notion of shared services and how energy plays into that as well as this private cloud business?

Bennett: It definitely plays, as both you and Doug have highlighted. As one moves into a private cloud model, it accentuates the need to have a better real-time perspective of energy consumption and what devices consume and are capable of, in order to manage the assets of the private cloud efficiently and effectively. Whether you have a private cloud, providing a broader set of services, you clearly want to minimize your own cost structures. That's going to be for good energy management as well as other items. Doug?

Oathout: Yeah. With the private cloud implementation and how a converged infrastructure would support that is that you want to bring the amount of resources you need for an application online, but you also want to be able to have the resources available to run a separate set of applications and bring that on line as well.

The living and breathing of a data center is really what we're talking about with a private-cloud infrastructure on a converged infrastructure.

You're managing a group of resources as a pool, so that over time you can manage up resources to run a particular application and then manage them down and put the resources back into pool, so they can be deployed for another application.

The living and breathing of a data center is really what we're talking about with a private-cloud infrastructure on a converged infrastructure. That living and breathing capability is built within the processes and within the infrastructure, so that you can run applications in an optimal way.

Gardner: It's my understanding that some of the public-cloud providers nowadays have built their infrastructure with conservation in mind, because every penny counts when you're in a lower-margin shared service and providing services business. They can track every watt. They know where it's all going. They’ve built for that.

Now, what about some of these older organizations, five years plus? What can be done to retrofit what's out there to be more energy efficient? How does this work toward the older sets?

Oathout: The key to that, Dana, is to understand where the power is going. One of the first things we recommend to a client is to look at how much power is being brought into a data center and then where is it going. You can easily do that through a facility survey or a facility workshop, but the other thing you want to look at is your IT. As you’re upgrading your IT, all the new IT equipment -- whether it be servers or storage or networking -- has power management built into it and has reporting built into it.

Collect information

What you want to do is start collecting that information through software to find out how much power is being absorbed by the different pieces of IT equipment and associate that with the workloads that are running on them. Then, you have a better view of what you're doing and how much energy you're using.

Then, you can do some analysis and use some applications like HP SiteScope to do some performance analysis, to say, "Could I match that workload to some other platform in the infrastructure or am I running it in optimal way?"

Over time, what you can do is you can migrate some of your older legacy workloads to more efficient newer IT equipment, and therefore you are basically building up a buffer in your data center, so that you can then go deploy new workloads in that same data center.

It's really using a process or an assessment to figure out how much energy you're using and where it's going and then deploying to this newer equipment with all the instrumentation built in, along with software to understand where your energy is going.

It's the way to get started but it's also the way to keep yourself in an automated way or keep yourself optimizing over time. You use that software to your benefit, so that you're freeing up capacity, so that you can support the new workload that the businesses need.

The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.

Bennett: That's really key, Doug, as a concept, because the more you do at this infrastructure level, the less you need to change the facilities themselves. Of course, the issue with facilities-related work is that it can affect both quality of service and outages and may end up costing you a pretty penny, if you have to retrofit or design new data centers.

Gardner: As I understand it now, we're talking about an initial payback, which would be identifying waste, hotspots, and right cooling approaches, getting some added capacity as a result, while perhaps also cutting cost. But, over time, there's a separate distinct payback, which is that you can control your operational costs and keep them at a lower percentage of your total cost of IT spend. Does that sound about right?

Oathout: That is right, Dana. You can actually decrease the slope of the energy curve. The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.

Over time, if you implement more efficient IT, you can actually decrease that slope to something much less than 11 percent growth. Also, as you increase your capacity in your data center in the same power envelope, you could actually start getting a much more efficient infrastructure running in the same power envelope, so you're actually getting to run that IT equipment for free energy, because you’ve freed up that energy from something else.

The idea of decreasing the slope or decreasing your budget is the start, but long term you're going to get more workload for the same budget. You can say the same thing for the IT management budget as well. You're trying to is get more efficiency out of your IT and out of your energy budget to support future workloads.

Gardner: And, the insight that you gain from implementing these sensors and tracking and automation, the ability to employ capacity-planning software, can bring out some hard numbers that allow you to be more predictable in understanding what your energy requirements will be, regardless of whether you are growing, staying the same, or even if you need to downsize your company.

Those numbers, that visibility, is something that can be applied to other assets allocations and important decisions in the enterprise around such things as perhaps carbon taxes and caps, as well as facilities, and even thinking about alternative energy sources.

Different approaches

Oathout: There are a lot of different ways to use green IT. We’ve seen customers implement a consolidation of infrastructure. They took a number of servers, a number of facilities associated with that server and storage environment, and minimize it down to a level that was very useable.

It gave the same service-level agreement (SLA) to their lines of businesses and they received energy credits from governments. They could then use those energy credits for monetary reasons or for conservation reasons. We also see customers, as they do these environmental changes or policies, look for ways that they can better demonstrate to their clients that they are being energy aware or energy efficient.

A lot of our clients use consolidation studies or energy efficiency studies as ways to show their clients that they are doing a very good job in their infrastructure and supporting them with the least possible environmental impact.

We see customers getting certificates, but also using energy consumption reductions as a way to show their clients that they’re being green or being environmentally friendly, just the same as you'd see a customer looking at a transportation company and how energy efficient they are in transporting goods. We see a lot of clients using energy efficiency in multiple ways.

Gardner: We've talked about Smart Grid for Data Centers several times. Now, let's drill down and describe exactly what it is. What are we talking about? What is HP offering in this category?

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.

Oathout: Smart Grids for Data Centers gives a CIO or a data-center manager a blueprint to manage the energy being consumed within their infrastructure. The first thing that we do with a Data Center Smart Grid is map out what is hooked up to electricity in the data center, everything from PDUs, UPSs, and error handlers to the IT equipment servers, networking and storage. It's really understanding how that all works together and how the whole topology comes together.

The second thing we do is visualize all the data. It's very hard to say that this server, that server, or that piece of facilities equipment uses this much power and has this kind of capacity. You really need to see the holistic picture, so you know where the energy is being used and understand where the issues are within a data center.

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.

Today, our servers and our storage are much more efficient than the ones we had three or four years ago, but we also add the capability to power cap a lot of the IT equipment. Not only can you get an analysis that says, "Here is how much energy is being consumed," you can actually set caps on the IT equipment that says you can’t use more than this. Not only can you monitor and manage your power envelope, you can actually get a very predictable one by capping everything in your data center.

You know exactly, how much the max power is going to be for all that equipment. Therefore, you can do much better planning. You get much more efficiency out of your data center, and you get more predictable results, which is one of the things that IT really strives for, from an SLA to getting those predictable results, day in and day out.

Mapping infrastructureSo, really Data Center Smart Grid for the infrastructure is about mapping the infrastructure. It's about visualizing it to make decisions. Then, it's about automating and capping what you’ve got, so you have better predictable results and you're managing it, so that you are not having out wires, you're not having problems in your data centers, and you're meeting your SLA.

Gardner: John, I'm going to grasp for another analogy here, it sounds like, once again, we're up against governance. It's an important concept and topic, when it comes to how to properly do IT, but now we are applying it to energy.

Bennett: That's just the reflection of the fact that for any organization looking to get the most value out of their IT organization, their infrastructure, and operations they need to address governance, as much as they need to address the business services they're providing, as much as they need to address the infrastructure with how they deliver it and how they manage things like energy and security in that environment. It's all connected then.

Gardner: I wonder if we have any examples of how this has worked in practice. Within HP, itself, I assume that you want to cut your energy bills as much as anyone else does, particularly in a down economy or when a growth pattern hasn’t quite kicked in fully. Are there any examples within HP or some customers or clients that you have worked with?

Oathout: In the HP example, our IT organization has gone from 85 data centers down to 6. They've actually reduced the amount of budget we spent on IT from about 4 percent of our overall P&L down to about 2 percent. So, they've done a very good job consolidating and migrating the workload to a smaller set of facilities and a smaller set of infrastructure.

They're getting a huge floor saving capacity back, but are also getting a power saving of 66 percent, versus where they were two years ago.

They're now in the process of automating all that, so long term we will have a much more predictable IT workload from an energy perspective. They're implementing the software to control the energy. They're implementing power capping. They're implementing a converged infrastructure, so they have the ability to share resources amongst application. HP IT has really driven their cost down through this.

We have another example with the Sisters of Mercy Health System, which did a very similar convergence of infrastructure on a smaller scale. In their data center, they freed up 75 percent of their floor space by doing server consolidation, storage consolidation, and energy management. They now have 25 percent of the footprint they used to have from a server-storage physical standpoint, but they are also only using about 33 percent of the energy they used to use within their environment.

So, they're getting a huge floor saving capacity back, but are also getting a power saving of 66 percent, versus where they were two years ago. By doing this converged infrastructure, by doing consolidation, and then managing and capping the IT systems, they’ve got a much more predictable budget to run their IT infrastructure.

Gardner: I suppose getting started is a tough question, because you could get started so many different ways and there is such wide variability in how data centers are constructed and how old they are and what the characteristics are. I almost know the answer to this question so many different ways -- but how do you get started, depending on what your situation is at this particular time?

Efficiency analysis

Bennett: For many customers, if they're struggling to understand where energy is being consumed and how it's being used, we will probably recommend starting with an energy efficiency analysis. That will not only do a thorough evaluation of both the facility and the infrastructure, but provide insight into the kind of savings you can expect from the different types of investment opportunities to reduce energy costs. That’s the general starting point, if you are trying to understand just what’s going on with the energy.

Once you understand what you are doing with energy, then you can dive into looking at a Smart Grid for Data Center solution itself as something to take you even further. Doug, how do you get started with that?

Oathout: Another way to get started, John, is deploying new IT infrastructure. Our ProLiant servers, our Integrity servers, or our storage products have the instrumentation and the monitoring all built into the infrastructure. Deploying those new servers or storage environments allow you to get a picture of how much energy is being used by those, so you can have more predictable power usage going forward.

Customers are using virtualization. Customers are trying to get utilization of the servers and storage environment up to a very efficient level. Having the power management and the energy monitoring being built into those systems allows them to start laying out how much infrastructure they can support in their data center.

One of the keys for us is to start deploying the new pieces of HP IT equipment, which are fully instrumented and energy efficient. You'll have the snapshot of actual power consumption, and, if you upgraded your IT facilities over a longer period of time, you can get a full snapshot of your infrastructure. You can actually increase the capacity of the data center just by deploying the new products that are much more efficient than the ones three or four years ago.

There are places in the world, such as the UK or California, where the power you have coming into your facilities is all the power you are ever going to have. So, you really have to manage inside of that type of regulatory constraint.

Bennett: That’s a good example of this integrated roadmap idea behind DCT. I characterize it as modernization, consolidation, and virtualization. Reallyit's, stepping up the capabilities or their infrastructure to both reduce cost, improve efficiencies, improve quality of service, and reduce the energy costs.

As Doug highlighted, after that phase of work is done, you've laid the ground work to consider taking advantage of that from an instrumentation and management point of view. You can augment that with further instrumentation of the racks and the data center resources in order to really implement a complete Smart Grid for Data Center solution. It's a stepping stone. It leverages the accomplishments done for other purposes to take you further into a good efficient operation.

Gardner: Based on some of the capacity improvements and savings, it certainly sounds like a no-brainer, but I have to imagine, John, that in the future, it's going to become less of an option and something that’s essentially mandatory.

An 11 percent annual growth in energy cost is not a sustainable trajectory. We have to expect that energy costs will be volatile, but, perhaps, over time more expensive, whether in real terms or when you factor in the added cost of taxation, carbon taxes and caps, and what have you. So, this is really something that has to be done. You might as well start sooner than later.

Bennett: Yes. And, regulations and governance from outside agencies is currently an issue. There are places in the world, such as the UK or California, where the power you have coming into your facilities is all the power you are ever going to have. So, you really have to manage inside of that type of regulatory constraint.

We have voluntary programs. Perhaps the most visible one is the European Data Center Code of Conduct, and clearly we expect to see more regulation of IT and facilities, in general, moving forward. Carbon reduction mandates impacting organizations are going to be external drivers behind doing this. Of course, if you get your hands ahead of the game, and you do this for business purposes, you will be well set to manage that when it comes.

Gardner: We've been talking about how to gain control over energy use and perhaps misuse in enterprise data centers. We were talking about how a Smart Grid approach, a comprehensive approach, using the available data to start creating capacity management capabilities, makes a tremendous amount of sense.

I want to thank our guests on this discussion. We've been joined by Doug Oathout,Vice President of Green IT Enterprise Servers and Storage at HP. Thank you, Doug.

Oathout: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been joined by John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks again, John.

Bennett: My pleasure, Dana. Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect Podcast. Thanks very much for listening, and come back next time.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please join me in welcoming our guests today. We're here with Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Gardner: Let me start with you, John. We're talking about some pretty big subjects. There's a lot to chew on here. Data-center transformation (DCT), I suppose, is the most general topic to approach and then to delve down more deeply. What do we mean nowadays by DCT? How does HP define it, and how does that relate to some of the business issues that IT folks are grappling with?

Not one-size-fits-all

Bennett: DCT helps customers implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Whichever combination of these fits a particular customer, there is the practical challenge of how to change from where you are today to having that implemented? That's what DCT is really about, because it helps implement these strategies through an integrated roadmap of data center projects by consolidation, energy efficiency initiatives, and technology initiatives, like virtualization and automation.

Each of these has its own short-term benefits and returns, but collectively the results get compounded over time, delivering the kind of benefits that we traditionally talk to with DCT. This is all in response to what's going on in customer environments.

I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs -- legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Facilities and data centers that were designed and built even five years ago might not have the energy and capacity to support current infrastructure environments. Then, of course, there's energy cost.

So, the CIO is at the heart of this vise. I like to think of DCT and converged infrastructure as kind of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City, where converged infrastructure is Emerald City. It's where you want to get to. DCT is the yellow brick road. It's how you get there, and they complement each other quite nicely.

Gardner: Doug, help me understand why this is important now. The way John is describing it, it seems that the same old approach just won’t hold up, that the trajectory of data centers is unsustainable, whether it's through cost, energy, or capacity issues.

It's not clear to me yet why this converged infrastructure is the right thing to do in totality. Are we talking about a rip-and-replace or are we talking about a gradual direction? Help me understand why, if you are going to move in that direction, you should start now.

Cutting innovation

Oathout: There is a major economic situation going on right now, Dana. As you said earlier, about two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the operations budget is spent on maintaining the IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Converged infrastructure is important now because we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two or three year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes -- virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

Gardner: So, clearly it's efficiency and better balance between supply and demand of resources, and then being able to apply those resources dynamically with a shared service model. All sounds very well and good. What are the hurdles? What's preventing people from getting to this vision?

Resilient and optimized

Oathout: The big hurdles to get over are the application managers themselves. Line of business comes to the applications team and say they need a SAP deployment or an Oracle deployment, and they tell them what hardware to put it on. In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Gardner: John, it sounds as if we're asking people, in a sense, to rethink things a little bit. Typically, as Doug pointed out, you start with the application set and you deploy it, and then you figure out the best way to operate that over time. We are trying to flip that on its head, thinking about what the operational outcome should be, and then go about applying those applications in the right fashion. Is that fair?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

Bennett: Well, I would suggest that good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

We also have the question of how it can be exploited for benefit. This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

Doug characterized it very well, when he said the SAP team wants a new deployment and they tell you what to put it on. The moment you do that, you're losing any of the advantages of a converged infrastructure.

Gardner: As you point out, rethinking IT has been happening for quite some time. We really don't have the luxury of standing still for very long in this industry. On the other side of the equation, you need to have a business or financial rationale to create that change in addition to having the vision of where you would like to go.

So, is there a business case, a rationale, a economic formula of some sort that HP is reflecting about -- how to go to those people who control the purse strings in order to move in this direction of a converged infrastructure?

Business plan in play

Bennett: There clearly is a business plan in play here. A lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of cost savings -- the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to -- the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Other benefits have financial benefits too. There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

The business case for transformation and the business case for a converged infrastructure should be constructed, and it's the best way to get the buy in from senior executives.

Technologists playing with toys is not a compelling argument for investment by a business. Technologists making significant investments to make sure that IT is aligned to the needs of the business and having the business case for it is a great way to get approval to go ahead.

Gardner: Doug, when we think about a shared services model and a natural progression toward more of a converged infrastructure that borrows from that shared services mentality, how do we move into this as a manageable progression? How do we avoid that thinking about a rip and replace or a massive disruption or throwing of a switch? How is this applied in terms of a managed process or a progression or evolution?

It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used.

All these environments have performance application service-level agreements (SLAs), associated with them. If you look at the different types of storage environments, there are different technologies that virtualize those today. These allow you to take large blocks of the storage and put them behind a virtual SAN or behind a virtualized environment, which allows you to share those resources amongst multiple server environments.

For example, we have a SAN Virtual Services Platform from HP, in which you can take heterogeneous storage, put it behind this virtual SAN technology, and actually get 30 percent of the capacity back, because all the over-provisioned disks now become available for all those applications sitting on the other side of the virtual SAN. We have a very similar technology from our LeftHand team, with our P4000, it does the same thing for direct-attached storage.

Using technologies like those to grab the excess capacity you have today by doing storage virtualization is very easy to do. It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used. A lot of our customers don't have to buy disks for two to three months, and then when they do buy disk, they can actually put it behind the SAN environment and multiple applications can use it and share it.

On the server side of things, server consolidation is very prevalent today, because the new servers are faster than the old. They have more memory capacity. They have virtual I/O built into them. So, it's very simple for you to consolidate servers, and when you are consolidating you use virtual I/O environment or FlexFabric environment. You then have the capability to dial up and dial down the I/O capacity of the server to meet the demand of the virtual machines running on it.

There is the server consolidation with virtualization that everybody knows, but then there is also the big benefit of storage virtualization and the fabric virtualization that can go on. Those are the three pieces. Once you get them in place, you can then start doing the automation, management, and the provisioning of workloads that John talked about much faster.

It's basically virtualizing that whole environment with resiliency and everything built into our ProLiant boxes and high availability business critical system boxes. You get all the capabilities and all the resiliency you need in them, and then you put virtualization on top of the storage networking and servers, and you really get the pool of resources that you can dynamically allocate.

Those three projects are the ones that give you that base from which you can then springboard your projects or your new applications.

Gardner: We've heard so much in the last year or two about cloud computing and private clouds. I think there is some confusion about private cloud. What we are talking about in terms of these converged infrastructures, the virtualization of various major aspects of your infrastructure, and then getting them to work in some harmony as a fabric. Are we talking about the same thing? Is cloud computing and converged infrastructure essentially the same? What is the relationship?

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter.

Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Optimizing over time

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

Gardner: John Bennett, when we think about that earlier imperative around flipping the balance of spending on operations into spending on innovation, when we think about moving toward a private cloud or cloud environment, and we charge people based on their usage, do they factor together? I'm trying to understand how we can both reconcile moving toward cloud and fabric and "blank as a service," and, at the same time, reduce those costs, so that we can get that business benefit and innovation engine roaring?

Bennett: That's a very interesting question. For an organization to make good business decisions, they need to have a very good understanding, not only of the benefits, which I talked about earlier, but of the costs. In this environment you get line of sight into the cost infrastructure, so you know what it costs you to provide services.

The businesses, in turn, know what it costs to take an offering to market, a cost based on reality and not based on just spread out mayonnaise models of financing. It lets them really understand the business and whether or not it's an investment they should make. There are clearly benefits on that side, if you can go that far. The benefit of moving to that services orientation is that it gives you clear insight into the cost structures.

It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Gardner: I'm always an advocate of showing rather than telling. I hope we have some examples to illustrate how some of your clients have undertaken a converged infrastructure initiative, and what some of the outcomes were. Does either of you have any examples today?

Oathout: There is a retailer we worked with called Stein Mart. They had an inflexible infrastructure to run nearly 300 stores in the Americas, and they were struggling to bring new applications on line quickly enough to support the demands of the store environment.

They bought into the converged infrastructure story. They bought into our BladeSystem Matrix product, which is the combination of storage, server, flexible network, software, and services.

We enabled them to run this BladeSystem Matrix environment. It allowed them to spin up applications in hours instead of days. It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Increased productivityStein Mart saw a significant cost reduction, because of the floor space they had in their data center. They saw a significant increase in productivity from their staff. They saw a 2x increase in response time for calls from the stores, and they saw a significant increase in the time to market for new applications. Instead of days, they were taking hours to set up new applications.

The second customer is the Dallas Cowboys. They built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. That's an evolution, versus a Stein Mart, which did a rip and replace to get better productivity to support their business.

Gardner: Any other examples and perhaps ways to demonstrate what HP can bring to this very complex equation?

The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Oathout: One other example we have is the airport in Dubai, which was a new business, one of the fastest growing airports in the world. They wanted to set up a shared-service environment for their retailers and other businesses around the airport. So, they actually set up a BladeSystem Matrix environment to run their video surveillance, their infrastructure, baggage handling, and all that.

They set up another environment, which allowed their retailers, passport personnel, and other businesses on site to use their shared service environment to really a full service to their client base inside the airport.

So, when a new business, a new government, or a new agency had to come into the airport, they didn’t have to worry about bringing infrastructure with them. The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Very productive

All three examples: Stein Mart, Cowboys, and Dubai airport, are very productive in how they bring applications online, very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

Gardner: I recall that HP announced converged infrastructure in November 2009, and this is something that I think pulls together a lot of aspects of what HP had been doing for some time. It's a complex process involving people, skills, and different product sets, different professional services, capabilities, and so forth. What makes HP different in terms of how they are accomplishing this notion of DCT, John?

Bennett: What makes us different is that, first of all, we don’t believe one size fits all. We believe that we need to do a good job working with our customers in understanding their strategies and goals and developing an infrastructure strategy that is aligned to that.

We also don’t believe that these infrastructure strategies for the future should have at their core monolithic computing solutions from the past. We also have a very flexible approach in our projects, in that we try to wrap the services we have available around the capabilities of the customer, rather than making them pay to have HP do everything.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools . . . will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools -- like the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and the assessment that goes with that -- will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

We try to offer a great deal of flexibility in how we work with customers, and also in how these are implemented. Customers can do these in a traditional customer-owned data-center environment, in an HP hosted environment, or even outsource it to HP. So, there's incredible flexibility based around the customers' needs and interests.

Gardner: You mentioned the maturity model. Is that a potential stepping stone of how to get started on some of these initiatives? Where could some of the folks who are contemplating their next moves architecturally, in terms of transforming their data centers, go to start? How do they get more information?

Oathout: There are two ways to get started. They can contact one of HP’s business partners. Our business partners are enabled to do our Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model. Or, you can come to HP.com/go/ci, and it will take you to the landing page for a converged infrastructure. A client or a customer could click on the Maturity Model, find out about what it can do for them, and then find a practitioner from HP that can come help them, through the Maturity Model, to show them the roadmap or the yellow brick road that John talked about to help them get to converged infrastructure.

Bennett: If the customer is interested in understanding all the things that HP might be able to do with them, they can engage with HP in a Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, Doug mentioned the CI landing page. They can also go to www.hp.com/go/dct to find out more about that. That will help them take a broader look at the IT infrastructure and facilities and environment, and look at it from a transformational perspective.

Gardner: Focusing on the future, as we look to close up, this strikes me as something that's not just a flash in the pan or a one- or two-year trend. This seems to me a long-term trajectory. This is pretty much an inevitable way in which data centers are going to develop, that is to say converged, fabric, service-oriented, with the efficiency of dynamic provisioning involved. Any thoughts about where this direction is going to take us, and do you agree that this is essentially inevitable?

Economies of scale

Oathout: It is inevitable, just because of the economies of scale, Dana. Truly, when you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

Gardner: Any last thoughts John in terms of the future direction and how long of a trend we are talking about here?

Bennett: How long a term is always difficult to say. One of the exciting things about IT in general is that we see this wonderful yin and yang, this give and take between technology advancements and customer expectations and uses. Customers challenge us to step forward to meet tomorrow's problems. Technology evolves, and we challenge customers to take advantage of it for a business benefit.

That's going to continue, as Doug highlighted, the economic value that comes from this convergence of infrastructure, and the economies of scale are very compelling, but I'm not going to predict how long it's going to last.

Gardner: Well, we'll certainly find out, won't we? It's been very good speaking with you. We've been talking about improved data center productivity through a progression to converged infrastructure.

We've been joined by two executives from HP. Doug Oathout is the Vice President of Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Thanks so much, Doug.

Gardner: And, thank you all for listening. This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.